BackgroundThe recurring resurgence of voting discussions prompted me to go back in time - like 12+ years ago when I first joined DPC. I got deep into trying to "resolve" the voting issue at that time. I found out that a member had designed a voting tool prototype that seemed very useful, so with his permission, I further developed it and made it available for people to use and I used it for awhile, but eventually it faded from use for any number of reasons. I thought I might resurrect it now in case anyone is interested.

What Is It?It is a javascript tool that simply breaks out scoring into five categories: Composition, Technical, Creativity, Appeal and Challenge topic relevance. You enter a score from 1-10 for each category and the tool will average them into an overall score, assuming you want equal weight assigned to each category. If you don't, you can turn off the "Auto Calc Score" and arbitrarily assign the Overall score manually. The individual scores still give the photographer feedback in each category. You can also add specific comments in each category. When you click the "Compile Ratings & Comments" button, it dumps everything into a text box that you then copy and paste into the comment box under the image on the DPC page. The voting tool is hosted in a frame on the left side, with DPC on the right. Here is a screenshot/overview:

Auto Calc, with comments ------------------------
Composition: 8 - Slightly higher angle would've helped
Technical: 6 - A touch too blurry
Appeal: 6 - not a lot of impact
Challenge: 4 - I see the connection, but I have to squint ;-)
Overall Calculated Average Score: 6, Not the worst I've seen

Same Thing with the "include rankings" unchecked ------------------------------------------------
Composition: Slightly higher angle would've helped
Technical: A touch too blurry
Appeal: not a lot of impact
Challenge: I see the connection, but I have to squint ;-)
Overall Comments: Not the worst I've seen

It will likely increase the amount of time it takes to vote, depending on how you vote, but it should increase the quality and value of votes and comments for the challenge entrant.

Anyone is free to use the tool here: //artroflmao.com/dpc/votehelper.htm - I can't provide much support for it - it's old tech, but still seems to work for me - so you're on your own and I hope you find it useful. Play around with it until you get used to how it works. In the past, people complained about even the idea of using this type of method - but use is optional and recipients of resulting comments should see this as beneficial, IMO.

If you'd like to read the crapstorm of the original discussion it is here. A couple of the original participants are still around (Neil, Skip) and may remember it.

I had a similar system in excel for a while. Interestingly, I found that even with weighted categories it had a centralizing effect on my score because I was averaging the multiple categories. For me, it was very hard to score something outside say 4 and 7 because there was always one factor pulling the score up or down. I eventually dropped it. This was just my experience, I'm not saying it won't work for others.

Maybe it's time to bring back some of these old discussions
Voting Stats

Holy cow! I don't remember seeing any of that before. Those certainly might be of interest to the folks in this thread. I'm not too interested in that level of analysis, but I know some are.

I'm amazed at how much effort goes into analysis and external enhancements to this site - including my own over the years.

Originally posted by DJWoodward:

I had a similar system in excel for a while. Interestingly, I found that even with weighted categories it had a centralizing effect on my score because I was averaging the multiple categories. For me, it was very hard to score something outside say 4 and 7 because there was always one factor pulling the score up or down. I eventually dropped it. This was just my experience, I'm not saying it won't work for others.

Yeah, I just used my tool to vote through the whole Incidental Art challenge and I find that I am not consistent in my weighting of the categories and I really don't think I want to be. Sometimes an image impresses me so much in one category or just in it's general impact and that will override all the other categories, but I still mark them the way I see 'em, but they may have little or no impact on the overall score. I also will likely only use this tool in 1 out of 3 challenges or less. Maybe more if a lot of people find the resulting comment very useful.

And isn't that where most of them should be, clustered around the 5.5 mark?

I found the VH remark to be moderately useful, though I think it may cause some recipients to merely focus their displeasure more specifically.

Don't get me wrong my average vote cast is pretty close to the middle of the scale but I like to use the whole scale. The compositing almost never resulted in a high or low score and some photos are deserving of both. For me the compositing resulted a 5 or 6 probably 95% of the time. It was just too centralizing. That's the nature of averaging.

BackgroundThe recurring resurgence of voting discussions prompted me to go back in time - like 12+ years ago when I first joined DPC. I got deep into trying to "resolve" the voting issue at that time. I found out that a member had designed a voting tool prototype that seemed very useful, so with his permission, I further developed it and made it available for people to use and I used it for awhile, but eventually it faded from use for any number of reasons. I thought I might resurrect it now in case anyone is interested.

What Is It?It is a javascript tool that simply breaks out scoring into five categories: Composition, Technical, Creativity, Appeal and Challenge topic relevance. You enter a score from 1-10 for each category and the tool will average them into an overall score, assuming you want equal weight assigned to each category. If you don't, you can turn off the "Auto Calc Score" and arbitrarily assign the Overall score manually. The individual scores still give the photographer feedback in each category. You can also add specific comments in each category. When you click the "Compile Ratings & Comments" button, it dumps everything into a text box that you then copy and paste into the comment box under the image on the DPC page. The voting tool is hosted in a frame on the left side, with DPC on the right. Here is a screenshot/overview:

Auto Calc, with comments ------------------------
Composition: 8 - Slightly higher angle would've helped
Technical: 6 - A touch too blurry
Appeal: 6 - not a lot of impact
Challenge: 4 - I see the connection, but I have to squint ;-)
Overall Calculated Average Score: 6, Not the worst I've seen

Same Thing with the "include rankings" unchecked ------------------------------------------------
Composition: Slightly higher angle would've helped
Technical: A touch too blurry
Appeal: not a lot of impact
Challenge: I see the connection, but I have to squint ;-)
Overall Comments: Not the worst I've seen

It will likely increase the amount of time it takes to vote, depending on how you vote, but it should increase the quality and value of votes and comments for the challenge entrant.

Anyone is free to use the tool here: //artroflmao.com/dpc/votehelper.htm - I can't provide much support for it - it's old tech, but still seems to work for me - so you're on your own and I hope you find it useful. Play around with it until you get used to how it works. In the past, people complained about even the idea of using this type of method - but use is optional and recipients of resulting comments should see this as beneficial, IMO.

If you'd like to read the crapstorm of the original discussion it is here. A couple of the original participants are still around (Neil, Skip) and may remember it.

OMG! I had no idea of the history, nor how much thought and time went into voting. It is incredible.

As I said Ken, your program is brilliant and having just been the recipient of it, I love the fact that there is obvious care and deliberation given to
the score and the reasons why. That 50% of people who enter a challenge vote seems to be the newest problem we have. It is hard to image the people
who still vote taking the time to use it. I would love to use it and am going to try.

Thanks for the demonstration, it is wonderful. As I have said so many times, I am so happy you are back.

Also, DJ thank you for the stats and the work that you put into this. It is so interesting!

I'm on board with this voting tool. I will not change the ones I've already voted on but will use it on the next challenge and see how I like it. I did try it out on one of my number 10 photos and it dropped 2 points. Personally for me, most of the time it's how a photo affects me instead of all the technical stuff.

Jeez, Jake, no offense intended (and none taken), but both your statements are false.
Just as we are allowed to rate the images in any fashion we choose, we are also allowed to rate them regardless of our perceived abilities.

My apologies. Vote as you wish by whatever method you wish - and I mean that with no sarcasm. I just must admit that after having considered time and again the real and potential faults of the voting system as they exist now the idea that a means by which the viewer could quantify a score across the piece parts used to evaluate it was the least of the potential issues I found. But I've been wrong before.

Technology is grand, and if this sort of thing helps you understand HOW you vote, it's a good thing. I would hope that being a photographer and doing photography, this is the sort of information we internalize.

Yeah, this is what happens nearly every time there is a discussion on scoring methods of any kind. It devolves into people telling other people how they should vote - or in some cases whether they should even vote at all. SMH.

The intent of the voting tool is NOT to standardize voting among members, nor even for a single member - Hell, I am not at all consistent even when using the tool. The intent of it is to provide a little more detailed feedback for the photographer than simply clicking a number and leaving no comment or even a comment like "Great Photo!". As someone else mentioned, it has a tendency to raise my scoring a point or so on many images because I think about them more. As I also mentioned, I will use the tool sometimes and sometimes I won't. Everyone is free to vote how they see fit and I would never presume to tell them their way is right or wrong and I wouldn't accept it from anyone else who tried to do that.

If you don't know how to compile a vote in your head, you shouldn't be voting. If you don't know how to break down and evaluate the components of an image in your head, you shouldn't be voting.

I'm sorry to inform you there is art in everything all around us. Maybe you're an engineer my life has been all about art and color and if I couldn't see New in the old and mundane, I wouldn't have been able to make a living and raise two girls mostly on my own. Let's not mix up Mars and Venus already.b

If you don't know how to compile a vote in your head, you shouldn't be voting. If you don't know how to break down and evaluate the components of an image in your head, you shouldn't be voting.

I'm sorry to inform you there is art in everything all around us. Maybe you're an engineer my life has been all about art and color and if I couldn't see New in the old and mundane, I wouldn't have been able to make a living and raise two girls mostly on my own. Let's not mix up Mars and Venus already.b

By way of explanation (and I've already said my mea culpa) my post and your interpretation of it couldn't have more disparate meanings. My post was not about art, it was about needing tools to quantify your opinions about it.

(BTW, my original "proof of concept" implementation does work in Firefox, so I'm not sure why Ken's revised variation does not.)

Not sure, but am guessing it has to do with this:
-----------------
onClick="AutoComment()" value="Copy to Clipboard"
...
frmDetVote.COMMENT.value = comm;
Copied = this.frmDetVote.COMMENT.createTextRange();
Copied.execCommand("Copy");
frmDetVote.COMMENT.focus();
-----------------
You're much better at this scripting than I am Eddy, so if you can tell me how to fix it, I will.

And if I didn't make it clear previously, EddyG deserves most of the credit for this - he had much of the interface and the calculations already coded and working. That is what compelled me - I hate to see that stuff go to waste.